news | Friday July 10, 2020
Crossing the Continent is the first instalment in beloved Québécois author Michel Tremblay’s Desrosiers Diaspora series. Translated by Sheila Fischman, it won the 2008 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse.
We have republished it with a beautiful new cover drawn by BC artist and illustrator Brad Collins.
Crossing the Continent tells the story of Rhéauna, who is born in Providence, Rhode Island, to a Cree mother and a French father. Affectionately known throughout Tremblay’s work as “Nana,” she has was previously sent with her two younger sisters, Béa and Alice, to be raised on her maternal grandparents’ farm in Sainte-Maria-de-Saskatchewan, a francophone Catholic enclave of two hundred souls. At the age of ten, amid swaying fields of wheat under the idyllic prairie sky of her loving foster family, Nana is suddenly told by her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in five years and who now lives in Montreal, to come “home” and help take care of her new baby brother.
Novels Crossing the City (2009 Prix du grand public Salon du livre de Montréal / La Presse), A Crossing of Hearts, and Rite of Passage, instalments two, three, and four in Tremblay’s saga, have also been published by Talonbooks.